The Mystic Barber

In my early teens, perhaps as a means of escaping a distinctly wacky homelife, I joined an organization devoted to the study of UFOs. While other boys were studying baseball statistics or even, god forbid, doing schoolwork, I was reading accounts of sightings, visitations and--though these were fairly rare back then--outright snatch-and-grab jobs by little green men. I now see that this was a precursor to some very serious years of drug use, both psychotropic and of the harder variety, that came later in college. By then I wasn't the least bit interested in waiting around for things to appear in the sky, presumably to take me away from Yonkers and the brick house in which I grew up. I had other means of escape.

            Meetings were monthly, and were held usually in one seedy hotel or another in the West Forties, an easy walk from Grand Central. All of these hotels looked alike, and all had about them the lugubrious air of suicide (and though, for some, self-murder could be a blessed release, one never sensed it in these surroundings; the smell of tough luck emanated from every wall), as though far too many people had checked in and were later checked out by police and ambulance crews, zipped into a body-bag, ready for the morgue.

            One rarely saw what one might think of as guests there--none of your well-dressed ladies and gentlemen sitting with cigarettes in the lobby, waiting for a taxi to take them to a show and dinner afterwards at Longchamps. In fact, there was no one, and never was, save the elevator man, always of color, and always beyond weary as he sat in his little room going up and down the floors.

            The organization was run by a very nice, unprepossessing type who could have easily passed for an accounting teacher at a community college. In the rented ballroom (and what would the competition be, I wonder? Surely not a celebration of some sort) would be a table stacked with books for sale, usually of the more serious type, for this was not a club devoted to the wholehearted belief that alien craft and pilots existed, but to debunking the false claims and sightings that in those days were fairly common.

            The meetings were attended by some forty or so people of varied ages (and, in retrospect, far more followers of the John Birch Society than one might imagine or be comfortable with), and the saucerman superior would start things off by introducing the group's accountant, a middle-aged man in a gray suit who looked like he walked out of a pinochle game in Washington Heights. "Cash on hand, $356. 54. Bills paid for the month of March, 1962: Fifteen dollars and twenty-nine cents for printing costs." (There was a newsletter, in fact, that you could read in under five minutes, so jammed packed with nothing it was.) "Twenty-three dollars to Cohen's Hebrew National Delicatessen for lunches. One hundred and fifty for this evening's speaker." Behind him, in a chair on the platform, would sit his wife, whom I remember as English and rather dowdy, who, in a deep trance sometimes broken by outbursts and exclamations, would hold a Ouija board on her knees, her fingers resting daintily on a planchette as it zipped around the alphabet, grabbing messages from the great beyond.

            The speakers ranged from Air Force officers to the respected journalist who wrote the first account of Betty and Barney Hill's supposed alien abduction, Incident at Exeter. In the audience on some evenings could be found such personalities as the legendary broadcaster Long John Nebel and the magician and sometime radio-personality The Amazing Randi. Meeting him I asked if I should call him Amazing or simply Mr. Randi, and we settled for Jim.

            Among the regulars there was the Mystic Barber, a chubby ordinary man with a five o'clock shadow in suit pants and open white shirt, who stood around 5'4" and who wore on his forehead a kind of TV antenna. In his ear was an earphone attached to what looked like a transistor radio wrapped in electrical tape. He claimed that he was listening to Mars, and for five dollars you could, too (though when he came to know my face he allowed me a freebie: static, sadly, is still static, no matter what planet generates it). In real life the Mystic Barber was Andy Sinatra, a Coney Island barber, whose afterlife lingers still in the photo taken of him by Diane Arbus. A photo of him--not hers--is above. 

            The very tall, skinny man in the light gray suit, the one who could be either an advertising executive or a retired basketball player (from my altitude, always close to the ground, I assessed him as being close to seven feet tall), was the man always known as Ed from Venus. The man was dead serious. He would ask intelligent questions of the speakers, listen attentively to the answers, and his manners would not have been out of place in the court of Louis XV. Yet he claimed to be from Venus and, if asked, would always tell any interested party how things were up there ("Cloudy," was the usual response).

            Another regular was a beautiful young woman--I would guess in her late twenties--who, wheelchair-bound, would be pushed in by another woman. She was genuinely beautiful; radiant, in fact, with a generous smile, golden hair and always dressed as if she were a bridesmaid. She carried a wand with a foil star on the end of it. This was the Princess of the Galaxies. It was how she was greeted, it was what she called herself, and as she was taken to her place at the end of an aisle, she would bless us with a wave of her wand.

   What remains of my memories of those times, over forty years ago, isn't anything about flying saucers or lights in the sky, but rather the people who came there--people older than I who, perhaps bullied in their youth for being crippled or outrageously tall or simply as ordinary, I now imagine preening for these monthly events, adjusting antenna, wand or gray suit, and then returning, as I now suspect, to a life of intense solitude in a studio apartment where all that remained for them was their imaginations, their sometimes identities, and their boundless desire to escape the four walls of their room. I consider my time there one of the formative elements in helping me become a writer.